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Opinion

Opinion

Based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events.

Increasing resistance to Quebec’s charter of values: Siddiqui

MONTREAL — The Jewish General Hospital will not be alone in its planned civil disobedience against the Charter of Quebec Values. The English Montreal School Board and the town of Hampstead in Montreal would also defy the Parti Québécois plan to ban religious clothing in the civil service and the broader public sector.

These institutions are daring the Pauline Marois government to cut off funding and prosecute their employees, should the bill before the National Assembly become law.

Côte St.-Luc, the other Montreal municipality with a sizeable Jewish population, has said it would not fire employees for wearing a kippa, turban or hijab during the time the law is being challenged in court, as it is bound to be.

Another welcome development: It’s not just anglophones opposing the bill. The French-language Université de Montréal and Université de Sherbrooke have joined McGill and Bishop’s universities and the English-language community colleges in condemning it. So has the Assembly of Catholic Bishopsof Quebec.

The bishops accused the government of trying to find a solution to a problem that does not exist, and for being confused between the “neutrality of the state and the neutrality of its employees” — religious neutrality means the state has no preference: no official religion but also no official atheism.

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More significantly, there’s rising resistance from two groups the PQ was counting on — sovereignists and feminists.

Marois and Co. posited the ban on the hijab as a measure to liberate Muslim women. But an increasing number of feminist organizations see it for what it is: an Islamophobic assault on the equality of Muslim women, by dictating to them what they can or cannot wear.

As for separatist dissidents, they are objecting mostly on tactical grounds — alienating minorities is counterproductive in the long run for the independence project. Former premiers Jacques Parizeau, Lucien Bouchard and Bernard Landry are among them. So is former Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe. He is suggesting a compromise — limit the ban on religious clothing to only “people in coercive authority,” such as judges, prosecutors and police. (That illogical suggestion was made by the 2008 commission on reasonable accommodation, but its co-chair Charles Taylorhas since told me that the idea was floated as an interim measure to appease the anti-Muslim brigades).

The Marois government, however, has toughened the bill, proposing a ban on kosher and halal food in daycare centres, and making it more difficult for non-Christian minorities to take days off for their religious festivals.

Indeed, the minority government may not want the bill passed, using it instead as a branding exercise — the way Stephen Harper passes unnecessary anti-crime bills to appease his conservative base, or the Republicans stoke emotive issues such as abortion and gay marriage to get their supporters out to the polls.

A defeat of the PQ bill would provide the excuse to call an election. Populist identity politics — driven mostly by spoken or unspoken xenophobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia — would drown out any debate over the sluggish economy and boost the chances of a PQ majority.

But even this much talked-about scenario is not going according to plan. The PQ can no longer claim that minorities are negating the majority will. Or that anglophones are defying francophones. Or that English Canada is ganging up against Quebec.

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That, however, is not sufficient, yet, to stop the ugly manifestations of the state-sponsored, populist McCarthy-esque politics:

A photograph of two women in niqab taking children from a daycare for a stroll was posted on Facebook, unleashing vile comments. “Let’s burn these women and rape them like pigs.” “Two bullets — it is hunting season.”

Anonymity confers a license on idiots, understood. But here’s how Bernard Drainville, minister in charge of the bill, gunned for the two women: “This is shocking, this is troubling, this is not acceptable. This is why we need to pass the bill.”

It did not matter that the parents of the tots expressed solidarity with the two workers at the private, non-subsidized daycare, which is outside the scope of his bill.

TV host and newspaper columnist Richard Martineau donned a burqa to mock the women and compared the niqab to a Ku Klux Klansman’s robe.

At a recent debate on a Montreal campus, two speakers walked out because of the hostility they faced for opposing the bill. One, Alexa Conradi, president of the Quebec women’s federation, which represents 185 organizations, told me she was booed and cut off twice. “It was a highly emotional debate based not on reason and logic but emotions.”

The PQ has tapped into something more than what is in the bill. “Is it about religion? Immigration? Identity? Values? Muslims? It’s all muddled together.

The result is demagoguery and hostility to minorities, especially Muslim women who are being harassed in the streets. “The government should be held responsible for it, because it premised the project on fear.”

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